Co-founders / partner

So Veeky Forums I'm in the process of starting a business that does IT consulting and I've already found my first customers. The problem is: I have no other co-founders and starting an IT business by myself rates somewhere between hard and impossible. I have thought about going to networking events but I live in the middle of no where and I can't move due to family which makes it hard for me to meet anyone.

My only options are to try find someone online but every website seems to be designed for normalfags to meet IRL and all I want to do is find another programmer like myself who wants to work remotely and be our own bosses. All the tools exist to do this like Slack, Git, Github, and Squiggle so I don't see collaboration being a huge problem.

You would think finding someone with some programming skills and spare time to join a promising business would be easy but this has turned out to be basically impossible. So far everyone I've found either doesn't have the time to commit to a business or is completely useless (like they can barely speak English or use a web browser kind of useless.)

What would you guys do if you were in my situation? I don't really want to burn out doing the work of 2 other people and nobody I know in real life has the time for this.

15 months ago

SniperWish

Bampu

15 months ago

Boy_vs_Girl

I would be interested in being a co-founder, OP. I'm a programmer and CS student. What state are you from BTW?

15 months ago

viagrandad

Look no further OP, recent computer engineering grad here with lots of free time, I've used those collab tools and am looking for basically exactly the arrangement you're talking about. Shoot me an email: [email protected]

and grab this guy @Boy_vs_Girl too.Nothing possibly could go wrong with sourcing your professional talent from Veeky Forums don't even worry about it

15 months ago

hairygrape

@Boy_vs_GirlThat's the thing user -- you can't really run a business when you're a full time student. I'm not dismissing your skills as you're probably a better developer than myself. Just saying that it would be far too hard to do this on a part-time basis.

@viagrandadI admit its a bad idea but honestly -- there has been successful startups that were founded remotely. I know that we post a lot of stupid shit on Veeky Forums but surely people can be mature when it comes to making money. I'll email you later but I'm not sure if you're taking the piss out of me.

I worked with a guy a while back and he only worked part time while I did virtually everything. It's just not a good mix. The business doesn't go any where and the guy doing all the work gets burned out.

15 months ago

Booteefool

Maybe I'm being unrealistic in expecting full time since everyone with any skills is already working a job ... but I dunno, there's got to be a NEET that's interested

15 months ago

massdebater

If I were you I'd send overall job description and information to myself at [email protected] I've been looking for a job like this.

15 months ago

kizzmybutt

I'm interested in what you're doing. I'm familiar with 7 programming languages, including scripting. I'm maker/founder of both studentdebtclock.org and feministsoftwarefoundation.org.

Let me know if you're interested.

15 months ago

RavySnake

Hey OP, I can help you out. I'm familiar with the tools you've mentioned and I'm in IT as well. If you're interested, hit me up at [email protected]

15 months ago

Spamalot

Well this thread seems promising. I didn't expect anyone to be interested and posted this mostly to vent ... would be incredible if I found a business partner here.

I have some stuff I need to take care of today but I'll get back to the anons who posted soon.

Reminder that statistically it's better to be a solo founder than to just get a random person to be your partner.

"You want someone you know well, not someone you just met at a cofounder dating thing. You can evaluate anyone you might work with better with more data, and you really don’t want to get this one wrong. Also, at some point, the expected value of the startup is likely to dip below the X axis. If you have a pre-existing relationship with your cofounders, none of you will want to let the other down and you’ll keep going. Cofounder breakups are one of the leading causes of death for early startups, and we see them happen very, very frequently in cases where the founders met for the express purpose of starting the company."

15 months ago

CodeBuns

I've had a series of moderately successful apps. I have access to investors in Silicon Valley. I would like to be growth strategy guy. I would take no salary just stock. Please let me know

@StonedTime It's a consulting firm that develops software for small businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs. It's not productivity software but financial software, and we're a very specialized company so I at least need to find a partner who can code. teach themselves new skills, and has enough time to contribute this per week.

If that sounds like you let me know what your email is and I can tell you more about it.

15 months ago

GoogleCat

I see lots of guys already posted. Meh, fuck it, I'll chip in.Can use some freaky math and code in C/C++ and Python, currently working as in-house PHP dev, also playing around with SQL.

@InmateBut why bring on a co-founder and give up 50% of your equity? Why not hire some offshore freelancers for $5/hr?

15 months ago

StrangeWizard

@DreamworxI haven't accepted any clients yet and I don't really plan to without having someone to discuss key decisions with and who can help out with the work load so I don't end up burning out trying to do the work of ~2 other people. I also think it would be a mistake trying to outsource everything to start with when I have little experience managing these kinds of projects / being a technical lead.

I've worked at a few software companies now and I never used to respect anything that went into building commercial software that wasn't coding: like getting requirements, organizing the project, determining market fit, etc ... until now. There's so much more to it behind the scenes than just coding and I guess these people must have been really good at their jobs for everything to work so flawlessly. Makes me feel kind of bad for being such a critic now ... but I'm learning.

@StrangeWizardHow do you start something like this? How do you go about finding customers?

15 months ago

DeathDog

@FastChef It's incredibly easy if you're doing something people genuinely want and the market isn't already saturated. After that its just a matter of using some marketing to find more people.

I think where people mess up is that they try promote something boring, useless, or high competition which is what makes business so hard: you have to be at the head of some trend that few people saw coming and the timing needs to be perfect. Too early and there's no momentum, too late and you've missed the opportunity.